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Orthodox Judaism treats women like filthy little things
Yossi Sarid explains that when ultra-Orthodox men in Israel push women to the back of the bus because they are not fit to be seen or spit on little girls because they disapprove of their dress, these misogynistic forms of behavior are not an aberration — they are the application of Jewish law.
If you would like to know the source from which your brothers derive their brazen behavior, go over to the study hall and open a page of Talmud. It’s true that the Torah has 70 faces, but the trend of these faces is clear: The source of the pollution is in halakha (Jewish law ) itself. What is happening in Beit Shemesh and its satellites is not “contrary to halakha,” it is mandated by halakha. And the rest will be told to the grandmothers, daughters and granddaughters.
Anyone ignoramus knows that the Torah’s “ways are ways of pleasantness,” that “the honor of a king’s daughter is within,” and that “proper behavior comes before the Torah,” but it’s worth knowing more. It’s worth knowing that a woman is unfit to be a judge, and is also unfit to give testimony. She is unfit for any public position with authority. “Thou shalt appoint a king over thee” – a king and not a queen.
A daughter, commanded the sages, must not be taught Torah, because “the mind of woman is not suited to be taught, but [only] to words of nonsense.” Women are light-minded and have little knowledge.
And if a man and a woman are drowning in a river, first they’ll save the man, “who is obligated to perform more commandments,” whereas a woman’s “wisdom is only in the spindle.” In fact, “words of Torah should be burned rather than being given to women.”
A man must say three blessings every day during morning prayers: He thanks God “that He didn’t make me a gentile, that He didn’t make me a woman, that He didn’t make me an ignoramus.” And it’s not proper to speak to a woman too much, since “all her conversation is nothing but words of adultery,” and whoever talks to her too much “causes evil to himself and will end up inheriting hell.” And let’s not even talk about the fate of someone “who looks even at a woman’s little finger.”
The extremists who spit at women, who call themselves Sikarikim, learned their lesson 101 times and learned it well: A husband would do well not to let his wife go outside, into the street, and should restrict her outings “to once or twice a month, as necessary, since a woman has no beauty except by sitting in the corner of her house.”
Because inside the house – very deep inside – her glorious honor awaits her: “Every woman washes her husband’s face and feet and pours him a cup and prepares his bed and stands and serves her husband. And any woman who refrains from doing any of these tasks that she is obligated to perform – is forced to do them.” Some recommend forcing her with a whip or by starvation “until she gives in.”
And needless to say, she is at her husband’s disposal whenever he is overcome by a desire “to satisfy his urges with her.” And if she continues to rebel, he always has the right “to divorce her without her consent.”
And there are many similar halakhot, only a few of which we have collected here. Nor have we cited everything in the name of the ones who said them, for lack of space. The readers are invited to find the references on Shabbat – and to browse around – on their own; this is a good opportunity for study. We will direct your attention to Tractate Shabbat, which does a good job of summing up halakha’s attitude toward women: “a sack full of excrement” with a bleeding hole.
Some people will seek to console themselves: It’s true that this is the halakha both m’doraita (from the Torah ) and m’drabanan (from the rabbis ), but that is not what is taught nowadays. But it suffices to listen to the sermon the sage Rabbi Ovadia Yosef delivered five years ago, based on the well-known halakhic work “Kitzur Shulchan Aruch”: “A man must take care not to walk between two women or between two dogs or two pigs, and men should also not allow a woman or a dog or a pig to walk between them.”
Treating women as impure and filthy begins with halakha and continues with actions. As long as the religious and ultra-Orthodox parties – Shas, United Torah Judaism, Habayit Hayehudi and National Union, none of which have any women in the Knesset – are not disqualified, their nakedness will continue to sing out and the nakedness of the land will be revealed.
High Court says Israel can exploit West Bank resources
Haaretz reports: The High Court of Justice has authorized Israel to exploit the West Bank’s natural resources for its own economic needs by rejecting a petition against the operation of Israeli-owned quarries in the territory.
In its ruling, issued on Monday, the court adopted the state’s position: that no new Israeli-owned quarries should be established in the West Bank, but existing ones should be allowed to continue operating.
The petition was filed two years ago by the Yesh Din organization. It argued that the 10 Israeli-owned quarries in the West Bank violate international law, which states that an occupier may not exploit an occupied territory’s natural resources for its own economic benefit; it may use such resources only for the benefit of the occupied people or for military purposes.
The Israeli quarries sell 94 percent of their yield to Israel and supply almost 25 percent of Israel’s total consumption of the raw materials in question. But until the petition was filed, the state had never seen any problem with this.
Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch, who wrote the ruling, began by accepting the state’s view that the Israeli-Palestinian interim agreement permits the quarries to operate in their present manner until a final-status agreement is signed.
She then moved on to discuss what international law has to say, and particularly Article 55 of the Fourth Hague Convention, on which the petition was based. That article requires the occupying power to “safeguard the capital” of the occupied party’s natural resources and “administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct,” meaning the rules governing fair usage.
But Beinisch accepted the state’s position that Israel’s use of the quarries is limited and does not amount to destroying their “capital,” and hence does not violate international law. This position is bolstered, she said, by the state’s decision not to permit any new quarries to open.
Moreover, she said, it is necessary to take account of the fact that the West Bank has been under a prolonged and continuing occupation, so the territory’s economic development cannot be put on ice until the occupation ends. The quarries, she noted, supply jobs and training to a non-negligible number of Palestinians; some of their yield is sold to the Palestinians; and the royalties the quarry owners pay the state – almost NIS 30 million a year – are used by the Civil Administration in the territories to fund projects that benefit the Palestinian population.
“In this situation, it’s hard to accept the petitioner’s unequivocal assertion that the quarries’ operation does nothing to advance the [Palestinian] region, especially in light of the Israeli and Palestinian sides’ mutual economic interests and the prolonged duration” of Israel’s presence in the West Bank, she concluded.
The petition was not a total loss for Yesh Din: Both the decision not to open new quarries and the decision to allocate all the royalties to the Civil Administration were made only after it was filed.
Nevertheless, attorney Michael Sfard, who represented Yesh Din, was disappointed.
“Mining natural resources in occupied territory for the economic needs of the occupying state is looting,” he said. “The High Court’s argument, that one should relate differently to a long-term occupation, cannot legitimate economic activity like this, which harms the local residents.”
How many U.S. soldiers were wounded in Iraq? Guess again
Dan Froomkin writes: Reports about the end of the war in Iraq routinely describe the toll on the U.S. military the way the Pentagon does [PDF]: 4,487 dead, and 32,226 wounded.
The death count is accurate. But the wounded figure wildly understates the number of American servicemembers who have come back from Iraq less than whole.
The true number of military personnel injured over the course of our nine-year-long fiasco in Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands — maybe even more than half a million — if you take into account all the men and women who returned from their deployments with traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress, depression, hearing loss, breathing disorders, diseases, and other long-term health problems.
We don’t have anything close to an exact number, however, because nobody’s been keeping track.
The much-cited Defense Department figure comes from its tally of “wounded in action” [PDF] — a narrowly-tailored category that only includes casualties during combat operations who have “incurred an injury due to an external agent or cause.” That generally means they needed immediate medical treatment after having been shot or blown up. Explicitly excluded from that category are “injuries or death due to the elements, self-inflicted wounds, combat fatigue” — along with cumulative psychological and physiological strain or many of the other wounds, maladies and losses that are most common among Iraq veterans.
The “wounded in action” category is relatively consistent, historically, so it’s still useful as a point of comparison to previous wars. But there is no central repository of data regarding these other, sometimes grievous, harms. We just have a few data points here and there that indicate the magnitude. [Continue reading…]
Largest Syrian opposition groups sign unity agreement
Pakistani death squads go after informants to U.S. drone program
The Los Angeles Times reports: The death squad shows up in uniform: black masks and tunics with the name of the group, Khorasan Mujahedin, scrawled across the back in Urdu.
Pulling up in caravans of Toyota Corolla hatchbacks, dozens of them seal off mud-hut villages near the Afghan border, and then scour markets and homes in search of tribesmen they suspect of helping to identify targets for the armed U.S. drones that routinely buzz overhead.
Once they’ve snatched their suspect, they don’t speed off, villagers say. Instead, the caravan leaves slowly, a trademark gesture meant to convey that they expect no retaliation.
Militant groups lack the ability to bring down the drones, which have killed senior Al Qaeda and Taliban commanders as well as many foot soldiers. Instead, a collection of them have banded together to form Khorasan Mujahedin in the North Waziristan tribal region to hunt for those who sell information about the location of militants and their safe houses.
Pakistani officials and tribal elders maintain that most of those who are abducted this way are innocent, but after being beaten, burned with irons or scalded with boiling water, almost all eventually “confess.” And few ever come back.
One who did was a shop owner in the town of Mir Ali, a well-known hub of militant activity.
A band of Khorasan gunmen strode up to the shop owner one afternoon last fall, threw him into one of their cars and drove away, said a relative who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. They took him to a safe house being used as a lockup for others the group suspected of spying for the drone program.
For the next eight weeks, they bludgeoned him with sticks, trying to get him to confess that he was a drone spy. He wasn’t, said the relative. Unable to determine whether he was guilty, his captors released him to another militant group, which set him free 10 days later.
“In the sky there are drones, and on the ground there’s Khorasan Mujahedin,” said the relative. “Villagers are extremely terrorized. Whenever there’s a drone strike, within 24 hours Khorasan Mujahedin comes in and takes people away.”
Most of them are killed. The group, named after an early Islamic empire that covered a large part of Central Asia, dumps the bodies on roadsides, usually with scraps of paper attached to their bloodied tunics that warn others of the consequences of spying for the U.S. Executions are often videotaped and distributed to DVD kiosks in Peshawar, northwestern Pakistan’s largest city, to hammer home the message.
The Cafe – Libya: When the impossible became possible
In his first interview, Saif al-Islam says he has not been given access to a lawyer
Human Rights Watch’s Fred Abrahams writes: The guards in the remote Libyan town of Zintan called their prisoner, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, “our black box.” The second-oldest son of Muammar Gaddafi knew the secrets of Libya’s past, they said: Gaddafi’s deals with foreign governments and companies, the whereabouts of still-missing prisoners, the details of crimes committed during the regime’s failed attempt to crush this year’s popular revolt. Saif al-Islam, 39, had to be protected so Libyans and the world could learn what had really taken place. And for the guards in Zintan, a town of 50,000 atop a desert mountain, keeping Libya’s most-wanted man safe from the sort of frenzied opposition fighters who had apparently executed Saif’s father and brother Mutassim also offered a chance to patch up the country’s reputation for justice after the Oct. 20 killing of Muammar Gaddafi.
As a special adviser for Human Rights Watch, I had arranged with the new Libyan government to interview Saif about the conditions of his detention after his arrest on Nov. 19 in the far south of his country. The International Committee of the Red Cross had visited four days into his detention, issuing a typically terse statement, and the public had not seen or heard from him since.
Saif entered the room draped in a large brown woolen cape with an embroidered fringe. He extended his left hand, keeping his right hand hidden beneath the cape. “Welcome to Zintan,” he said with an ironic smile, eliciting a chuckle from his captors and from me. The smile was bright. But Saif had lost the flair that I’d seen on television and heard about from those who had met him before. He had a scraggly beard and his once clean-shaven head was ringed by a horseshoe of graying hair. The setting was not what Libya’s heir-apparent would have been used to: a dimly lit room with a faded carpet and cushions along the edge. Two years ago he threw a lavish party for his 37th birthday on the coast of Montenegro; guests, reportedly, included Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska and Prince Albert of Monaco.
Saif joked casually with the guards. “Ohhh, very good,” he said when they gave him his rimless glasses, which had been taken to Tripoli for repair. I thought his nonchalance suggested that he failed to grasp the gravity of his situation. Or maybe that’s how a person acts when born into a dictator’s family and is accustomed to solving all problems with orders or money.
Dan Ephron reports: Aisha Gaddafi, the daughter of the late Libyan dictator, is asking the International Criminal Court to investigate the killing of her father and her brother Mutassim by Libyan opposition forces in October, suggesting that the rebels, together with NATO forces, may be guilty of war crimes.
The petition raises legal questions about the nine-month insurgency that toppled Muammar Gaddafi and, indirectly at least, about the role American troops played as part of NATO.
But it has garnered attention for another reason as well: Aisha’s lawyer is from Israel, a country Muammar Gaddafi refused to recognize and often described as illegitimate.
The decline of the American empire
Activists hold mass rallies across Syria
The New York Times reports: Tens, and possibly hundreds, of thousands of people defied a continuing government crackdown to fill the streets of several Syrian cities on Friday, intent on showing visiting monitors from the Arab League the extent of opposition to President Bashar al-Assad.
As thousands marched in Idlib, Homs, Hama and in the suburbs of the capital, Damascus, violence flared at several of the rallies. By day’s end, activist groups said that more than two dozen people had been killed by security forces. The large crowds, while not unprecedented, underscored the resilience of the protest movement despite United Nations estimates that more than 5,000 people have died since opposition to the government galvanized in March.
A protester in Dara’a, who reported huge demonstrations, said: “We want to show the Arabs and the world that we are peaceful protesters, not criminals or armed gangs. The coming days and weeks will prove our statements, not the regime’s story.”
The government’s supporters also held rallies, according to witnesses and the Syrian state news agency, SANA, which posted photographs of large gatherings in Aleppo and Damascus. The news agency said the protesters were “demanding the Arab League observer mission to be credible and professional in conveying the facts of what the terrorist groups are perpetrating.”
The arrival of the observers has been one of the most closely watched developments in the nine-month-old Syrian conflict. For days this week, their role was heavily criticized by opposition activists, who complained about the paltry number of observers and about the mission’s leader, a former Sudanese general. The military intelligence branch he oversaw has been accused of crimes by human rights groups.
Many feared the mission was another stalling tactic by the government. Even so, everyone seemed to want a minute of the observers’ time.
By week’s end, after four hectic days of visits, the observers seemed to have ushered in a new phase of the conflict, or at the very least, altered its dynamic.
The excommunication of Ron Paul
Steve Kornacki writes: When you’re running near the top of the polls, it’s inevitable that your opponents will gang up on you. But there’s something different about the nature of the attacks Ron Paul is now facing – and, potentially, about their implications.
In the past few days, three of Paul’s rivals – Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann – have publicly declared that the Texas congressman will not under any circumstances win the GOP nomination. Bachmann called him “dangerous,” while Gingrich said he wasn’t even sure he’d vote for Paul over Barack Obama. Another candidate, Rick Santorum, said there’s no difference between Paul and Obama on foreign policy and that he’d need “a lot of antacid” to stomach voting for Paul. And Jon Huntsman launched a scathing anti-Paul ad in New Hampshire with a simple title: “Unelectable.”
This is not a run of the mill pile-on. Paul’s foes aren’t simply telling Republicans that he’s not the best choice to be their nominee; they’re telling Republicans that he’s unfit to call himself one of them – that he’s an imposter who isn’t due even the most basic courtesy (“Oh sure, if he ends up being the nominee I’ll be with him…”) that major candidates for the nomination are typically afforded.
It’s an attitude that’s also being encouraged by some of the GOP’s most powerful opinion-shaping forces. Rush Limbaugh has been disdainful of Paul throughout the campaign, with his guest host this week – Mark Steyn – keeping up the campaign. Fox News, whose primetime hosts have alternated between ignoring and savaging Paul, has been treating him like a pariah since the last campaign, when Paul was denied a seat at a critical pre-New Hampshire debate. And the New Hampshire Union Leader, which boasts one of the country’s most influential conservative editorial pages, branded Paul “truly dangerous” on Thursday.
The roots of this anti-Paul alarmism go deeper than the racist newsletters that were sent out under Paul’s name in the early 1990s and that have attracted new attention in the past week. Sure, the newsletters (and Paul’s shifting explanations for them over the years) would help make him an unelectable GOP nominee, but rest assured the same intraparty voices would be railing against him with the same adamance even if they’d never emerged.
The reason has to do with Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy and his unapologetic mockery of the “clash of civilizations” ethos that has defined the post-Cold War GOP. Today’s Republican Party is dominated by Christian conservatives (44 percent of participants in the 2008 primaries identified themselves as evangelicals) and neoconservatives, who are united in their commitment to an unwavering alliance between the United States and Israel, confrontation with Iran, and a significant American presence in the Middle East. Paul’s warnings about “blowback” directly threaten this consensus.
Why Ron Paul challenges liberals
Matt Stoller writes: The most perplexing character in Congress, ideologically speaking, is Ron Paul. This is a guy who exists in the Republican Party as a staunch opponent of American empire and big finance. His ideas on the Federal Reserve have taken some hold recently, and he has taken powerful runs at the Presidency on the obscure topic of monetary policy. He doesn’t play by standard political rules, so while old newsletters bearing his name showcase obvious white supremacy, he is also the only prominent politician, let alone Presidential candidate, saying that the drug war has racist origins. You cannot honestly look at this figure without acknowledging both elements, as well as his opposition to war, the Federal government, and the Federal Reserve. And as I’ve drilled into Paul’s ideas, his ideas forced me to acknowledge some deep contradictions in American liberalism (pointed out years ago by Christopher Laesch) and what is a long-standing, disturbing, and unacknowledged affinity liberals have with centralized war financing. So while I have my views of Ron Paul, I believe that the anger he inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.
My perspective of Paul comes from working with his staff in 2009-2010 on issues of war and the Federal Reserve. Paul was one of my then-boss Alan Grayson’s key allies in Congress on these issues, though on most issues of course he and Paul were diametrically opposed. How Paul operated his office was different than most Republicans, and Democrats. An old Congressional hand once told me, and then drilled into my head, that every Congressional office is motivated by three overlapping forces – policy, politics, and procedure. And this is true as far as it goes. An obscure redistricting of two Democrats into one district that will take place in three years could be the motivating horse-trade in a decision about whether an important amendment makes it to the floor, or a possible opening of a highly coveted committee slot on Appropriations due to a retirement might cause a policy breach among leadership. Depending on committee rules, a Sub-Committee chairman might have to get permission from a ranking member or Committee Chairman to issue a subpoena, sometimes he might not, and sometimes he doesn’t even have to tell his political opposition about it. Congress is endlessly complex, because complexity can be a useful tool in wielding power without scrutiny. And every office has a different informal matrix, so you have to approach each of them differently.
Paul’s office was dedicated, first and foremost, to his political principles, and his work with his grassroots base reflects that. Politics and procedure simply didn’t matter to him. My main contact in Paul’s office even had his voicemail set up with special instructions for those calling about HR 1207, which was the number of the House bill to audit the Federal Reserve. But it wasn’t just the Fed audit – any competent liberal Democratic staffer in Congress can tell you that Paul will work with anyone who seeks his ends of rolling back American Empire and its reach into foreign countries, auditing the Federal Reserve, and stopping the drug war. [Continue reading…]
Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies
Hamas forces ordered to cease attacks on Israeli targets, Palestinian sources say
Haaretz reports: Hamas leader Khaled Meshal has instructed the group’s military wing to cease attacks on Israeli targets, senior sources in Fatah say.
The sources say Meshal issued the order based on understandings between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Meshal during their recent talks in Cairo.
Israeli defense sources say they are unaware of such an order.
According to the sources in Fatah, the largest faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization, Meshal ordered a de facto cease-fire with Israel not only in the Gaza Strip, but also in the West Bank. Hamas had already refrained from launching rockets from Gaza.
The sources say Meshal issued the order in late November, after the first round of reconciliation talks in Cairo between Hamas and Fatah.
After that meeting, it emerged that the two organizations agreed also to focus on a popular struggle along the lines of the Arab Spring.
Israeli defense sources say they were unaware that Meshal had issued a direct instruction to activists in the West Bank and Gaza. They add that there has been no strategic or ideological change in Hamas’ policy.
Rather, Hamas realizes that this is a bad time for terror attacks, both because of Palestinian public opinion and a fear of an Israeli reprisal that would compromise Hamas’ control of the Gaza Strip.
But if the group’s terror networks in the West Bank spot an opportunity to carry out a significant attack, they are expected to take advantage of the chance, as they have done in the past.
Hamas’ leadership in Gaza said it was surprised by Meshal’s statement and that “the only way to liberate the occupied lands is through the armed struggle.” The Hamas interior minister in Gaza, Fathi Hamad, added that the group’s “internal leadership” does not necessarily intend to abide by Meshal’s policy.
Meshal reiterated late last week that popular protest had “the power of a tsunami” and has already proved itself in the Arab world. But he added that the organization would not give up the use of violence against Israel.
“We and Fatah now have a common basis that we can work on, and that is popular protest, which expresses the power of the people,” Meshal said.
The Hamas leader also expressed his support for a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. “Fatah and we have political differences, but the common ground is agreement on a state within the 1967 borders,” he said.
Meshal said the decision to focus on the popular struggle was made by the Hamas advisory body, the Shura Council. This means all senior members of the organization were on board.
The Fatah sources said Hamas does not intend to officially recognize Israel or accept peace agreements with it. Rather, the focus is simply popular protest and consent to a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. The sources say Hamas does not plan to stop arming itself, and will respond if attacked by Israel.
The Fatah sources say the statements by the Hamas officials in Gaza show that some leaders in the enclave might seek to undermine the move by Meshal, and that they might also launch attacks on Israel, mainly to prove their political power in the internal struggle in Hamas.
But the sources added that Meshal clearly seems interested in unity and in bringing Hamas into the PLO.
Militants from other factions in the Gaza Strip are still launching attacks, like the group that was hit Tuesday by the Israel Air Force. Islamic Jihad, one of these factions, is not expected to join Meshal’s move.
The Palestinian chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said the Palestinians had not proposed to renew negotiations based on a prisoner release.
Erekat said that stopping the settlements, negotiations based on the 1967 borders, and the release of prisoners are not preconditions but rather Israeli obligations. Without them, the Palestinians don’t see a renewal of talks with Israel, he said.
Meanwhile, the speaker of the Palestinian parliament, Aziz Duwaik, a Hamas member, said yesterday that parliament would convene a joint session in both Gaza and the West Bank as early as the beginning of February.
Parliamentary activity has been suspended since June 2007, after Hamas’ coup in the Gaza Strip. According to Duwaik, a Palestinian unity government will be established at the end of January, and it will have no political tasks other than preparing for elections.
Duwaik denied reports that he would head the unity government.
Mossad chief: Nuclear armed Iran not an existential threat to Israel
A year ago Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Tamir Pardo as the director of Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad. Pardo has spent his whole career in Mossad — an organization which in recent years has focused most of its attention on Iran. It is reasonable to assume that there is no one else inside Israel’s national security establishment who is in a better position to assess the threat Iran might pose to the Jewish state.
So, when Pardo addressed a meeting of 100 Israeli ambassadors who had returned home for their annual meeting this week, one might expect that Iran would have been the focus of his concerns, but apparently not.
For 20 minutes he spoke about the threat to Israel’s economy posed by the economic crisis in Europe. Israelis have good reason to be worried. Europe provides the market for a third of Israel’s exports.
As for Iran, Pardo covered the topic in just five minutes during which time he admonished those who use the term “existential threat” too freely.
If Iran obtains nuclear weapons, this will not mean the destruction of the State of Israel, Pardo says.
“Does Iran pose a threat to Israel? Absolutely. But if one said a nuclear bomb in Iranian hands was an existential threat, that would mean that we would have to close up shop and go home. That’s not the situation,” ambassadors present quoted Pardo as saying.
Haaretz reported:
The ambassadors said Pardo did not comment on the possibility of an Israeli military assault on Iran.
“But what was clearly implied by his remarks is that he doesn’t think a nuclear Iran is an existential threat to Israel,” one of the envoys said.
Did anyone in Washington hear that? Or is everyone too busy drumming up fear about “existential threats”?
Hawks who learned nothing
Matt Duss writes: This month, after almost nine years that left 4,484 American soldiers and well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, the U.S. war in Iraq came to an end. As the troubling recent reports indicate, the new Iraq will continue to struggle with enduring political tensions and serious security challenges for years to come.
As my colleague Peter Juul and I noted in our recent report on the war’s costs, The Iraq War Ledger, the end of former Iraq President Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a considerable global good, and a nascent democratic Iraqi republic partnered with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future. But when weighing those possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy.
While these questions will doubtless continue to be debated into the future, the holiday season and the New Year are an appropriate time to move beyond the rifts that so divided our country over this war.
But before we do, let’s take a moment to remember some of the people who got the Iraq War completely wrong. This is important not only as a historical matter, but also because many of these same people are now calling for escalation against Iran, from the same perches and sinecures whence they helped get our country into Iraq. And, as former general Anthony Zinni said in regard to the consequences of a war with Iran, “If you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’re gonna love Iran.”
It’s worth noting that a lot of people got various things wrong about Iraq at various times. This writer is no exception. But the following critics are particularly notable not only because they were completely and catastrophically wrong about the costs and benefits of the Iraq War, and more generally about the capacity of American military power to determine outcomes, but also because they tended to go about it in the most condescending way possible. They have also suffered no apparent penalty for it. Going forward, our country will be safer and more secure in inverse proportion to the amount of influence these people have. [Continue reading…]
2012 embedded journalism
The parasites in the belly of the beast of American capitalism
Robert Scheer writes: It is official now. The Ron Paul campaign, despite surging in the Iowa polls, is not worthy of serious consideration, according to a New York Times editorial; “Ron Paul long ago disqualified himself for the presidency by peddling claptrap proposals like abolishing the Federal Reserve, returning to the gold standard, cutting a third of the federal budget and all foreign aid and opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
That last item, along with the decade-old racist comments in the newsletters Paul published, is certainly worthy of criticism. But not as an alternative to seriously engaging the substance of Paul’s current campaign—his devastating critique of crony capitalism and his equally trenchant challenge to imperial wars and the assault on our civil liberties that they engender.
Paul is being denigrated as a presidential contender even though on the vital issues of the economy, war and peace, and civil liberties, he has made the most sense of the Republican candidates. And by what standard of logic is it “claptrap” for Paul to attempt to hold the Fed accountable for its destructive policies? That’s the giveaway reference to the raw nerve that his favorable prospects in the Iowa caucuses have exposed. Too much anti-Wall Street populism in the heartland can be a truly scary thing to the intellectual parasites residing in the belly of the beast that controls American capitalism.
It is hypocritical that Paul is now depicted as the archenemy of non-white minorities when it was his nemesis, the Federal Reserve, that enabled the banking swindle that wiped out 53 percent of the median wealth of African-Americans and 66 percent for Latinos, according to the Pew Research Center.
Why does the newspaper of the Establishment feel the need to knock down the Paul campaign?
Up until recently, the mainstream media treated Paul as the invisible candidate — a man supposedly so marginal that “serious” pundits could ignore him. But his growing popularity means he can no longer be dismissed and thus the Times editorial writers feel driven to try and swat this persistent irritant.
Even so, given that the Times will undoubtedly endorse Obama and given that the odds are at this point stacked quite heavily in the incumbent’s favor, why the need to attack Paul?
Because the New York Times thinks it is entitled not only to endorse its favored presidential candidate but also choose his opponent and that most likely would be Mitt Romney.
In a contest between Obama and Romney, the president can cast his opponent as the representative of Wall Street and present himself as a man of the people. And the newspaper that represents the status quo can disingenuously pose as an agent of change.
Paul has the power to upset that scenario and turn this into an election about issues instead of the usual beauty contest. The candidate who we are repeatedly told can’t be taken seriously threatens those whose vested interests are served by the trivialization of the electoral process.
This isn’t an endorsement for Ron Paul — simply a statement of what should be obvious: he has a positive role to play in 2012.